With the excitement of a perfectly executed thriller and the force of a parable, The Stranger is the ultimate masterpiece from Nobel Prize Winner Albert Camus—one of the most engaged and intellectually alert writers of the past century.
Albert Camus's spare, laconic masterpiece about a murder in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with an almost scientific clarity, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.
The Stranger is a short novel written by Nobel-prize winner essentialist-but-not-really Camus. There are a few things you should know about this book. One, it has plenty of philosophical meaning and such, but if you're not interested in that, the plot isn't very strong. Two, if you are interested in what Camus has to say, The Stranger is interesting and pretty readable. And three: Camus is very interested in absurdism and the meaning of life. Overall The Stranger is pretty depressing.
Somehow I actually became pretty interested in the main character Meursault, despite the distant and detached narration. Sometimes, especially near the end, Camus' philosophical ideas overshadow his literary ones. There is not much time to get bored though, since The Stranger has the length of a weighty novella.
